Creative Leaps

Writers on Writing: Julie Otsuka (The Buddah in the Attic)

Writers on Writing: Chris Bohjalian "The only reason writers publish, is to stop rewriting."

from You Tube series Writers on Writing: Heidi Julavits Another beautiful question: "The imaginative possibilities are endless, so how do you productively limit your possibilities?"

"It's not enough to write what you know."

As a little break from the series of posts I've been writing, about the Island Fiction series, I thought I'd offer a guest post by UK publisher/writer Nick Gillard. He says Le Bleuet bookshop  "...bucks all the trends. It really is the exception that proves the rule. But it works! And just shows anything is possible. Remarkable place." With the population of Provence at around 4.5million this makes me wonder why we couldn't support something so culturally rich in at least one of our islands. Or are there some? Know of a genuinely Caribbean bookshop with a sincere passion for reading and   selling Caribbean children's books? Tell us about it! (See below for Nick's post about Le Bleuet.) Unapologetically French Librairie ‘Le Bleuet’, Banon, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. Nick Gillard If you were planning to open a bookshop these days I suspect even the new ‘business-friendly’ banks might raise an eyebrow or two. Certainly, you would be co...

In order to compete for readers and for young people's attention, the boundaries of good sense seem to be more and more fluid, if they exist at all. With Island Fiction I believe we did not shy away from raw reality, and the kind of social honesty and emotional integrity that young readers crave. Writers were asked to take risks, to not be too goody-two-shoes.  These are  pre-requisites  for an audience of tween readers leaving behind the world of illustrated  books and ushering in realms of more abstract imaginings. I am proud of the IF balance between the appeal of age appropriate risks and parental concerns about both language rightness and moral righteousness. By my own gauge, we never compromised our impressionable audience with  distracting sell-out concepts or provocative ambiguity. The goal was to tell a good story in any genre of speculative fiction that would appeal to both boys and girls between the ages of 10 to 14. Each title fulfils that goal admi...

I feel it's worth digressing a bit from the story of the series here, to say that I have been able to make  some observations about Caribbean children's book publishing, because I have  been engaged  as a published author, YA series editor and in the volunteer work as  Regional Advisor of the SCBWI- Caribbean South. ( In 2012 I handed over the chapter to a budding new Trinidadian children's book author, Marsha Gomes) SCBWI CARIBBEAN SOUTH RA: Marsha Gomes If I had a blue note for everyone in Trinidad alone who has approached me about getting published, I would be significantly well-off today. I have in fact shared such a degree of intellectual property and networking benefits that  one publisher, after giving a contract to yet another writer I had recommended,  asked why I didn't set up an agency and take a commission - which is typical industry standard. My interest is not in talent management. It was and is no skin off my back to connect people and ...

I began working on Island Fiction soon after  I founded the first South Caribbean chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, with my counterpart in Bahamas, Rosemarie Johnson Clarke,  simultaneously initiating the first SCBWI group for the northern Caribbean. While we share the same surname, we had not yet met in person, and are not related, that we know about. We enjoyed the "Same-Name Thing" as  a bit of encouraging coincidence.   We came to the work with a keen awareness that our region is fraught with all kinds of challenges, not the least of which is the geography of an archipelago not easily bridged by affordable air travel. We believed, and hoped, that the fast growing internet  technology would serve to connect and grow our writers' communities in all the islands. Almost a decade later, the kind of interactivity we had hoped for is still not yet typical of our Caribbean culture; certainly not with regards to the mission of c...

The more I thought about it, the opportunity to create a series for young teens, was potentially something well beyond any one storyline that  a single author could conceive. My personal goals have always included contributing to creative community, and I couldn't approach this opportunity any differently. In his brilliant essay "What the Twilight Says", (1998 Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Derek Walcott expresses something that feels akin to my own creative soul movement: We knew the literature of empires…(omission is mine); and both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began. In the early 90s, after a 2-year apprenticeship to the late media icon Dale Kolasingh, I conceived and helped pilot the first sports and leisure television magazine, Caribbean Sports Digest, with one of our living legends in sports media, Tony Harford. By ...

Honoured to be Listed in Top 20 Best Caribbean Book Blogs Adrew Blackman, is the author of two published books (Legend Press): On the Holloway Road (2009), which won the Luke Bitmead Writer's Bursary and was short listed for the Dundee International Book Prize;  and A Virtual Love (2013) which deals with the issue of identity in this digital age of social networking. Originally from the UK, Blackman spent six years in New York as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. On his blog Andrew offers a free eBook detailing $250k worth of short story prizes and a free newsletter with updates.  He introduces his list of his TOP 20 BEST Caribbean Blog picks by saying that he moved to Barbados recently and has been keen to discover more about Caribbean literature from online blogs.  He adds, "It took me some time to search out the best ones, so I thought I'd share with you this list of blogs by readers and writers from the Caribbean." Island Fiction Series ...

Historically, so much of what is written by West Indians is pedantic, journalistic, corporate, or emerges from the stiff upper lip of literary ambition. Since 2000, I began my career as a published children's book author, which unapologetically lodged me in the world of literacy, as a "primary school teacher-working-as-writer"; and in a publishing industry that targets children and their educators with  content focussed on 'readability' within sound social values and basic language structure. My ambition remains: to craft intellectual properties that are conceptually conceived, expressed through "low text density", and that can be  visually depicted by the illustrators whose art will attract young and immature/ reluctant readers. In general, my interest in picture books, and cinematic storytelling also fits well with the decade of work I already had under my belt in television production: GEMINI TV; AVM TELEVISION; SUN TV; CARIBBEAN SPORTS DIGEST and ot...

The "Thoroughly Conscious Ignorance" of BEAUTIFUL QUESTIONS:  (adapted from my FB page Creativity and the Primary School Teacher) Not all questions should be answered. And some questions just lead to other questions of a higher quality. Beautiful Questions are valued by Creative Writers. We know that they are open-ended maps to the kind of inner exploration that leads to insights we could never predict or intellectually control up front. Beautiful Questions, awaken our characters' inner QUESTS in ways that are unique not only to the fiction we craft but to our own  inner sense of being creative.  In Macmillan's Island Fiction series, the authors answer the question of "self" for tweens and teens by presenting novellas wrought int he fire of many Beautiful Questions.   Each story begins the archetypal hero's journey that winds and twists through the inner life of its main character, so that the outward action of the story potentially s...